I follow Trigger toward the staircase. I’ve already heard too much, and I can’t process all the information clunking around in my head. Each bit feels like a jigsaw puzzle piece that doesn’t match the image on the box. The image of a city I thought I knew. A life I thought I understood.
We crawl several feet past the window before we stand, just in case, but then we race silently toward the end of the hall, heedless of the cameras.
Trigger opens the stairwell door slowly to keep it from squealing. I step inside and he uses his free hand to close the heavy door as slowly as he opened it. I can no longer hear Ford 45 and the commander talking, yet I can’t unhear what they’ve already said.
Anomaly.
Recall.
Examination.
Trigger takes the first three steps quickly and silently in his boots, and there’s years of training in each graceful motion.
I have no training. So far I’ve survived on luck. But that will have to change.
I take that first step, but I can’t feel the tread beneath my foot. I can’t feel the sweat that has gathered behind my knees and between my breasts. I can’t feel the air I inhale as I stare at our intertwined fingers.
“Dahlia, we have to go.”
I take another step, then another, and soon we’re flying down the stairs together, and it feels a bit like talking to him in the Workforce Bureau stairwell, only more dangerous and terrifying and somehow exhilarating. Because this time I’m not just supposed to be somewhere else.
I’m supposed to be dead.
After they finish examining me, Management will complete their recall and I will become the five thousandth brown-eyed, brown-haired, right-handed sixteen-year-old female corpse.
Trigger seems even more determined than I am not to let that happen to me.
But I can’t let that happen to anyone. I can’t let Poppy, or Sorrel, or Violet be…
How would they die? Gas, or injection, or one of the other supposedly humane ways governments put people to death in our barbaric past?
I stop several steps above the fourth-floor landing, and Trigger turns to look up at me. “We have to help them.” I’m breathless, not from the exertion, but from the horror of what’s about to happen if we can’t stop it.
“Help who?”
My best friend. My roommates.
“The four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine girls who look just like me, Trigger. Gardeners, electricians, plumbers, medical technicians, carpenters, mechanics, and dozens of other trade laborers. They’re going to die, even though there’s nothing wrong with them, unless we do something!”
He glances down the stairwell, and I can see urgency in the motion. “What can we do? Even if we could free them from wherever they’re being held, where would we take them?”
“There has to be somewhere we could hide them. I mean, if you can hack the security cameras and the communication feeds, couldn’t you type something somewhere and make it look like they’ve already been recalled?”
“Probably,” Trigger admits, yet his forehead is more furrowed than I’ve ever seen it. “But I can’t hack into people’s brains and make them remember doing something they never did. Like euthanizing five thousand identicals.”
“We have to try. Wouldn’t you try to save your identicals if they were being recalled?”
“My identicals are cadets. We know from the time we can walk that someday we’ll die in the service of this city.”
“So your friends would just line up to be killed?” That doesn’t sound much like the only cadet I’ve actually met.
Trigger’s frown deepens, as if he’s considering that question for the first time. “Well, no, if they didn’t believe their deaths would benefit the city, they’d probably fight. That’s what we’re trained to do. But no one in their right mind would tell an entire division of Defense cadets that they’re about to be euthanized. They’d have to do it without warning us. Maybe while we were asleep.” He shrugs, and I’m pleased to see that he at least looks bothered by the idea. “But your sisters aren’t cadets.”
“That doesn’t mean they won’t fight. If they know what’s about to happen—if they know that they’re not flawed and their existence is no real threat to the city—they’ll fight.” I grip the stair rail in white-knuckled determination. Poppy loves a good argument. I can’t believe she wouldn’t fight for her life. And if she would, others might. “Even five thousand untrained girls have a shot at overwhelming whoever’s in charge of the recall if those in charge aren’t expecting it.”
Isn’t that possibility exactly why the recall hasn’t been announced? To avoid panic that might lead to unrest. Insubordination.
Trigger takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Dahlia, do you understand what you’re suggesting?”
“I…” I’m suggesting the only thing I can think of that might actually save every friend I’ve ever had from pointless euthanasia, but I haven’t given much thought to the bigger picture: what that will mean for us afterward.
“You’re talking about a rebellion. A revolt, albeit with teenage girls rather than armed militants.” Trigger leans against the concrete stairwell wall, crossing his arms over his chest. “The city will never stand for that.”
“What do we have to lose? Management is going to kill them all anyway, so if we fight and die we’re no worse off than we would be if we didn’t fight in the first place.”
“No, they’re no worse off. If we run now, you and I might make it out. If we fight with your sisters, we’ll probably all die.”
I don’t even try to hide my disappointment from him. “I thought you were prepared to die.”
“I am. But I’m not prepared to see you die.”
My chest aches again. There is a strangely raw, vulnerable quality in his voice now that makes my heart feel as if my lungs are suddenly shrinking around it. “I don’t want to die either, Trigger, but I’m not sure I can go on living knowing that all my sisters died and I did nothing to try to stop it.”
“They’re right, Dahlia.” His focus on my eyes intensifies, as if he’s looking for something. Or maybe he’s found something. “You are different from the others.”
Trigger stares at me in the dim stairwell, and I can almost see him weighing his options. I’m not leaving Poppy or any of the others here to die.
Finally he nods. “Okay. Let me see what I can find out.” He pulls a small tablet from the inside pocket of his uniform jacket and begins to tap and scroll. “You know this is crazy, right?”
I’m not sure I understand. According to my year-twelve social anthropology unit, crazy means mentally disordered. The inability to draw or keep one’s thoughts in logical order.
Is that one of my defects?
I glance up at Trigger, and with one look at my face he gives me a small smile. “It’s an expression. Do they not say that in Workforce?”
I shake my head.
“It means that only someone with an inability to see the logical flaws in our plan would go through with it. But you’re not literally insane.” Trigger turns back to his tablet. “I can get into your instructor’s feed again, but since Sorrel 32 isn’t Management, she might not have access to the information we’re looking for, and we don’t have time for me to hack anyone else’s account.”